1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to systems and methods for the collection of market research data from a plurality of cooperating retail stores.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Various arrangements have been employed for the collection, summarization and forwarding of Point-Of-Sale purchasing information from retail stores for purposes of market research since the advent of Point-Of-Sale (POS) optical scanners and the widespread use of the Universal Product Code (UPC) to identify retail products. Typically, retail purchase data is summarized by an in-store POS controller or by a separate store computer attached to the POS controller in the store or, if the store is part of a large retail store chain, by a central or host computer at the headquarters of the retail store chain. The summarized retail purchase data is then typically forwarded to the users of the data by any one of a number of different data storage and transmission techniques, for example, by magnetic tape or disk or diskette or by telephonic data transmission or by over-the-air data transmission.
For example Daniel Jr., et al., U.S. Pat. No. 4,972,504 issued Nov. 20, 1990 and assigned to the present assignee, discloses a marketing research system and method for obtaining retail data on a real time basis.
The identification of frequent shoppers and analysis of their purchases can be important to retailers since frequent shoppers may be the most valuable of customers. In order to determine what steps might increase the loyalty of frequent shoppers, a retailer may wish to study the distribution of times between visits of frequent shoppers and average purchase amount for frequent shoppers as compared to infrequent shoppers. Market research studies of frequent shopper behavior may also be of interest to packaged goods manufacturers and advertising agencies.
To date technological limitations on identifying people for in-store market research studies have dictated the use of identification methods that both require a high degree of cooperation and that incidentally provide unique identification, such as identification cards that are issued to cooperating panelists and that can be read by barcode-reading equipment installed in a grocery store checkout counter. For example, a panelist study is disclosed by Eskin et al., U.S. Pat. No. 4,331,973. Other studies have used panels of cooperating shoppers who paid for their purchases with personal checks and automatic check-reading equipment, of the sort commonly used in banking, was used at the point of sale to read the panelist's bank account number and to identify the panelist.
Another method and apparatus for identifying individual members of a marketing and viewing audience are taught by David A. Kiewit U.S. Pat. No. 4,930,011, issued May 29, 1990 and assigned to the present assignee. The disclosure of U.S. Pat. No. 4,930,011 is incorporated herein by reference. Kiewit's disclosed system includes small radio transmitters that broadcast uniquely coded identification signals to be detected by data collection equipment at monitored locations within retail establishments and homes.
The use of special physical identification devices, such as cards, limits a market researcher's ability to accurately measure a panelist's shopping behavior. In the first and third cases described above, a shopper will not be counted if he or she forgets to carry the identification card or radio transmitter. In the second example a shopper will not be identified if payment is made in cash rather than by personal check. An automatic identification system that could recognize people who had previously shopped at the store and that could log the frequency and temporal distribution of their shopping trips would be valuable for retail market research studies.
Identification methods that provide an input to a retail store's computer system or that can be used to correlate the panelist and with his or her purchases are particularly advantageous to market researchers.
A number of known prior art methods of partially automatic individual identification require active cooperation on the part of the person to be identified. Some of these, such as the measurement of characteristic features of the hand, as taught by Kondo in U.S. Pat. No. 4,206,441, or of the retina, as taught by Flom and Safin in U.S. Pat. No. 4,641,349, have proven to be useful for regulating access to secure areas. Partially automatic facial image recognition systems have been taught by Felix et al, in U.S. Pat. No. 4,449,189, who describe a personal access control system using a combination of speech recognition and an analysis of characteristic shapes of the speaker's mouth. Goldman, in U.S. Pat. No. 4,811,408, teaches the use of identification cards bearing at least one portion of the image indicia. Gotanda, in U.S. Pat. No. 4,712,103, teaches an identification card or key with a password, and requires a human operator to perform the face recognition portion of the identification work.
Daozheng Lu, in U.S. Pat. No. 5,031,228, issued Jul. 9, 1991 and assigned to the present assignee, discloses an image recognition system and method for identifying a pattern of a plurality of predetermined patterns in a video image. A plurality of feature image signatures are stored corresponding to each of the plurality of predetermined patterns. A universal feature image signature is stored that includes each of the stored feature image signatures. A predefined series of portions of a captured video image is sequentially compared with the universal feature image signature to identify matching portions. Each of the identified matching video image portions is compared with the stored feature image signatures to identify the predetermined pattern.
Daozheng Lu, in U.S. Pat. No. 4,858,000, issued Aug. 15, 1989 and assigned to the present assignee, discloses an image recognition method and system for identifying predetermined individual members of a viewing audience in a monitored area. A pattern image signature is stored corresponding to each predetermined individual member of the viewing audience to be identified. An audience scanner includes audience locating circuitry for locating individual audience members in the monitored area. A video image is captured for each of the located individual audience members in the monitored area. A pattern image signature is extracted from the captured image. The extracted pattern image signature is compared with each of the stored pattern image signatures to identify a particular one of the predetermined audience members. These steps are repeated to identify all of the located individual audience members in the monitored area. The disclosures of U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,858,000 and 5,031,228 are incorporated herein by reference.